The new MerchantCircle allows consumers to find and engage with qualified providers in their local areas while giving merchants the ability to cost-effectively market their businesses and acquire new customers. Key features for merchants include the following:
- LeadStore: a Twitter-like feed for leads, LeadsStore allows merchants to pick and choose leads from a real-time list of relevant consumers directly from their merchant dashboard.
- DealStore: a new service that increases the visibility of merchants' deals, coupons and other promotions with premium placement on City pages, emails and the MerchantCircle.com category page.
- Local sponsorships: offers merchants premium placement of their listing in city/category-specific search results.
- Preferred badges: provides an exclusive opportunity to post an official MerchantCircle Preferred business badge to merchant listing pages to provide transparency to searching customers.
- Lead management: allows merchants to review and manage all customers via the dashboard, or set up the system to deliver new customer leads directly to their inbox or mobile device.
MerchantCircle complements these features by allowing consumers to seamlessly move from search to transaction. For example, consumers searching for "roof repair" in their local area will be presented with the option to connect to the best local roofers and/or "request quotes" from multiple local providers.
These inquiries are serviced by the relevant subset of member service providers within the extended Reply! network. MerchantCircle will also introduce new functionality in the coming months that will let consumers see which vendors have received their requests and manage their responses.